Corporeal ontology: Merleau-Ponty, flesh, and posthumanism

As posthumanism has developed in the last twenty-five years there has been hesitation in elucidating a robust posthumanist engagement with the body. My thesis redresses this gap in the literature in three intertwined ways. First, it is a critical assessment of posthumanism broadly, focusing on how the body is read in its discourse and how there is a continuation of a humanist telos in terms which revolve around the body. Second, it is a philosophical interrogation, adaptation, and transformation of aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, focusing its reading on Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, with additional material drawn from his works on language, aesthetics, and ontology. Third, it is a critical analysis of four films drawn from that seemingly most posthumanist of genres, science fiction: Cronenberg's eXistenZ, Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Rusnak's The Thirteenth Floor, and Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. Science fiction is the meeting place of popular and critical posthumanist imaginaries as the vast majority of texts on posthumanism (in whatever form) ground their analyses in a science fiction of some kind. By reading posthumanism through the work of Merleau-Ponty I outline a posthumanist ontology of corporeality which both demonstrates the limitations of how posthumanism has done its analyses of the body and elucidates an opening and levelling not adequately considered in posthumanist analyses of the body. Following Merleau-Ponty I argue that there is a ‘belongingness of the body to being and the corporeal relevance of every being’, yet, the body is not the singular purview of the human. There are alternative embodiments and bodies which have been previously overlooked and that all bodies (be they embodied organically, technologically, virtually or otherwise) are corporeal

Expressing corporeal silence: phenomenology, merleau-ponty, and posthumanism

The question for this article is not whether phenomenology is posthumanist in the sense that it is attendant to the bifurcations and exclusions inherent within humanism. Neither is it to trace this within posthumanism, broadly, as a form of criticism and analysis. Rather, the point is to demonstrate how phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s work, can contribute to addressing questions concerning subjectivity and corporeality in contemporary posthumanist discourse. More radically, it seeks to disclose how phenomenology, particularly existential phenomenology in its Merleau-Pontyan mode, signals a beginning of posthumanist philosophy, or, rather, of posthumanist forms of philosophizing.by Angus McBlan

Acting in (a musical) Concert: Jogappas on stage and their performance(s)

by Prerna Subramanian and Angus McBlan