On the motivations for Merleau-Ponty’s ontological research

This paper attempts to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s later work by tracing a hitherto overlooked set of concerns that were of key consequence for the formulation of his ontological research. I argue that his ontology can be understood as a response to a set of problems originating in reflections on the intersubjective use of language in dialogue, undertaken in the early 1950s. His study of dialogue disclosed a structure of meaning-formation and pointed towards a theory of truth (both recurring ontological topics) that post-Phenomenology premises could not account for. A study of dialogue shows that speakers’ positions are interchangeable, that speaking subjects are active and passive in varying degrees, and that the intentional roles of subjects and objects are liable to shift or ‘transgress’ themselves. These observations anticipate the concepts of ‘reversibility’ and ‘narcissism’, his later view of activity and passivity, and his later view of intentionality, and sharpened the need to adopt an intersubjective focus in ontological research

Phenomenology is not phenomenalism. Is there such a thing as phenomenology of sport?

Background: The application of the philosophical mode of investigation called “phenomenology” in the context of sport. Objective: The goal is to show how and why the phenomenological method is very often misused in the sportrelated research. Methods: Interpretation of the key texts, explanation of their meaning. Results: The confrontation of concrete sport-related texts with the original meaning of the key phenomenological notions shows mainly three types of misuse – the confusion of phenomenology with immediacy, with an epistemologically subjectivist stance (phenomenalism), and with empirical research oriented towards objects in the world. Conclusions: Many of the discussed authors try to take over the epistemological validity of phenomenology for their research, which itself is not phenomenological, and it seems that this is because they lack such a methodological foundation. The authors believe that an authentically phenomenological analysis of sport is possible, but it must respect the fundamental distinctions that differentiate phenomenology from other styles of thinking

The Paradox of a Gesture, Enlarged by the Distension of Time: Merleau-Ponty and Lacan on a Slow-Motion Picture of Henri Matisse Painting

In his lecture series The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), Lacan refers to a “delightful example” that Merleau-Ponty gives in his Book Signes (1960). Lacan describes it as a “strange slow-motion film in which one sees Matisse painting.” This is a scene from the documentary entitled A Great French Painter, Henri Matisse, by director François Campaux, a 16mm black and white film shot in 1946. Merleau-Ponty points, as Lacan puts it, to “the paradox of that gesture which, enlarged by the distension of time, enables us to imagine the most perfect deliberation on each of these strokes.” In fact, Merleau-Ponty underscores that this is an illusion, due only to the technique of the slow motion picture. In this paper I will present the different ways in which Lacan and Merleau-Ponty refer to the slow motion picture of Matisse painting. I will do so in order to consider, comparatively, the ways in which Merleau-Ponty and Lacan define the gesture in reference to film technologies and to the process of subjectification. Both of them refer to the gesture in order to find a new balance in the relationship between subject, rationality and media technology. And it is exactly at this site where the question of an ethics of gesture appears

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze as interpreters of Henri Bergson

In this essay I concentrate on the relation between Deleuze's philosophy and Merleau-Ponty's. I examine the question of whether their philosophical projects are as widely divergent as Deleuze wants the reader to believe. Since explicit references to Merleau-Ponty in the work of Deleuze are rather rare, I take the detour of examining their interpretations of Henri Bergson, a philosopher they both recognized as an important source of inspiration. More specifically, I study the references to Bergson in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze that deal with difference and immanence. I show that Merleau-Ponty merely reads Bergson as a difference thinker, whereas Deleuze stresses Bergson's immanentism. However, these two positions do not exclude one another. First of all, there are many similarities with respect to which Bergsonian concepts both authors focus on and how they interpret them. Secondly, as Deleuze's own philosophy illustrates, a philosophy of difference is not incompatible with immanentism. However, there is one passage in Cinema I. The Movement-Image in which Deleuze states that there is a fundamental difference between the battle against dualism as it is fought by Bergson on the one hand, and phenomenology on the other. Since Deleuze's search for an immanent philosophy relies heavily on concepts introduced by Bergson, this passage can help to indicate to what degree the aforementioned similarities between Deleuze's and Merleau-Ponty's immanentism hold

The articulation of enkinaesthetic entanglement

In this article I present an argument for the necessary co-articulation of meaning within our felt enkinaesthetic engagement with our world. The argument will be developed through a series of stages, the first of which will be an elaboration of the notion of articulation of and through the body. This will be followed by an examination of enkinaesthetic experiential entanglement and the role it plays in rendering our world meaningful and our actions values-realising. At this stage I will begin to extend Husserl’s notion of intentional transgression to the enkinaesthetic sphere of lived experience, and in support of this claim I will examine the theoretical and practical work of osteopathic manual listening [Gens & Roche 2014] and the ‘felt sense’ in focusing [Gendlin] which makes possible a shift from a somatic articulation to a semantic, and potentially conceptual, one. Throughout, my position will be compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “Whenever I try to understand myself, the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and with it comes the others who are caught in it.” [Merleau-Ponty 1964a, p.15]

Merleau-Ponty and neuroaesthetics: Two approaches to performance and technology

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Digital Creativity, 23(3-4), 225 - 238, 2012. Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14626268.2012.709941.Assisted by the rapid growth of digital technology, which has enhanced its ambitions, performance is an increasingly popular area of artistic practice. This article seeks to contextualise this within two methodologically divergent yet complimentary intellectual tendencies. The first is the work of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, who recognised that our experience of the world has an inescapably ‘embodied’ quality, not reducible to mental accounts, which can be vicariously extended through specific instrumentation. The second is the developing field of neuroaesthetics; that is, neurological research directed towards the analysis, in brain-functional terms, of our experiences of objects and events which are culturally deemed to be of artistic significance. I will argue that both these contexts offer promising approaches to interpreting developments in contemporary performance, which has achieved critical recognition without much antecedent theoretical support

Neither playing the game nor keeping it real: media logics and Big Brother

Sam Pepper, one of the contestants in Big Brother 11, at one point accused fellow housemates Josie and John James of feigning romantic feelings for each other in order to cash in on lucrative deals with celebrity magazines such as OK! and Hello!. The provocation caused much apparent offence, and led to a prolonged and predominantly rancorous debate about authenticity and inauthenticity, soon extending to revelations that other housemates (Rachel, Corinne) aimed to appear in soft pornography titles like Nuts and Zoo, and as such, ‘couldn’t be trusted’. The clear subtext was that any economic motivation was considered a breach of the rules of the Big Brother game – not the explicit parameters of the competition, but the spirit in which it should be played. Being a worthy winner is a matter of who you are rather than what you do, which raises the question of how we came to know Josie and co, as well as how we come to know celebrity selves generally. If BB has taught us anything about the formation of mediated selves, it is that an authentic mediated self cannot exist – and yet authenticity still matters. This piece reflects on this tension and its implications for our increasingly reflexive media culture

A Hierarchy of Deaths: Stem Cells, Animals and Humans Understood by Developmental Biologists.

Stem cell basic science has sparked a lot of attention because of its use of cells coming from 'destroyed' embryos. An ethnographic study conducted in two developmental biology laboratories located in India and France demonstrates that lab professionals do not see the use of these cells as controversial. What appears to be a major topic of reflection is the killing of mice. A hierarchy of deaths is delineated when biologists evoke the kind of lives at play in their science. A comparison between narrations of cell experimentations and mice sacrifices enriches a biological approach to the living through genetics, which is nonetheless performed in daily scientific practices. Laboratory workers enact other perceptions that point at being alive or having a life. They acknowledge, with personal convictions or expressions of intense affects, lives that are said to be embodied and experienced, while being hierarchised for the sake of science and dying patients. Laboratory workers' narratives of a hierarchy of deaths provide them with arguments to engage with discussions happening outside of their workplace about the handling of living materials in experimental settings

From RNA folding to inverse folding: a computational study: Folding and design of RNA molecules

Since the discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1953s and its double-chained complement of information hinting at its means of replication, biologists have recognized the strong connection between molecular structure and function. In the past two decades, there has been a surge of research on an ever-growing class of RNA molecules that are non-coding but whose various folded structures allow a diverse array of vital functions. From the well-known splicing and modification of ribosomal RNA, non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are now known to be intimately involved in possibly every stage of DNA translation and protein transcription, as well as RNA signalling and gene regulation processes. Despite the rapid development and declining cost of modern molecular methods, they typically can only describe ncRNA's structural conformations in vitro, which differ from their in vivo counterparts. Moreover, it is estimated that only a tiny fraction of known ncRNAs has been documented experimentally, often at a high cost. There is thus a growing realization that computational methods must play a central role in the analysis of ncRNAs. Not only do computational approaches hold the promise of rapidly characterizing many ncRNAs yet to be described, but there is also the hope that by understanding the rules that determine their structure, we will gain better insight into their function and design. Many studies revealed that the ncRNA functions are performed by high-level structures that often depend on their low-level structures, such as the secondary structure. This thesis studies the computational folding mechanism and inverse folding of ncRNAs at the secondary level. In this thesis, we describe the development of two bioinformatic tools that have the potential to improve our understanding of RNA secondary structure. These tools are as follows: (1) RAFFT for efficient prediction of pseudoknot-free RNA folding pathways using the fast Fourier transform (FFT)}; (2) aRNAque, an evolutionary algorithm inspired by Lévy flights for RNA inverse folding with or without pseudoknot (A secondary structure that often poses difficulties for bio-computational detection). The first tool, RAFFT, implements a novel heuristic to predict RNA secondary structure formation pathways that has two components: (i) a folding algorithm and (ii) a kinetic ansatz. When considering the best prediction in the ensemble of 50 secondary structures predicted by RAFFT, its performance matches the recent deep-learning-based structure prediction methods. RAFFT also acts as a folding kinetic ansatz, which we tested on two RNAs: the CFSE and a classic bi-stable sequence. In both test cases, fewer structures were required to reproduce the full kinetics, whereas known methods (such as Treekin) required a sample of 20,000 structures and more. The second tool, aRNAque, implements an evolutionary algorithm (EA) inspired by the Lévy flight, allowing both local global search and which supports pseudoknotted target structures. The number of point mutations at every step of aRNAque's EA is drawn from a Zipf distribution. Therefore, our proposed method increases the diversity of designed RNA sequences and reduces the average number of evaluations of the evolutionary algorithm. The overall performance showed improved empirical results compared to existing tools through intensive benchmarks on both pseudoknotted and pseudoknot-free datasets. In conclusion, we highlight some promising extensions of the versatile RAFFT method to RNA-RNA interaction studies. We also provide an outlook on both tools' implications in studying evolutionary dynamics