Individuation, affectivity and the world

reframing operative intentionality (Merleau-Ponty)

Elodie Boublil

pp. 271-290

in: Iulian Apostolescu (ed), The subject(s) of phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 2020

Abstract

In Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, Merleau-Ponty draws on Malraux's theory, developed in Le Musée Imaginaire and Les Voix du Silence, according to which modern art is the achievement of subjectivity's creative powers in its ability to achieve the metamorphosis of the world through her works. This essay aims to show that the idea of "coherent deformation" illustrates Merleau-Ponty's attempt to rethink subjectivity's individuation as a creative yet ontological pattern that recasts the dynamics of operative intentionality and its expressions. I show that in response to Malraux, Merleau-Ponty works out a diacritical sense of individuation as style that conveys existential possibilities. This conception proposes a "phenomenology from within" that relies on literary, psychoanalytic and artistic works to exhibit the metamorphosis of the subject in and through her world.

Cited authors

Merleau-Ponty Maurice

Malraux André