Resistance of the Sensible World
An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty
This book can be opened with
Note on our eBooks: you can read our eBooks (ePUB or PDF) on the free Fordham Books app on iOS, Android, and desktop. To purchase a digital book you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one. After purchasing you will receive instructions on how to get started.
In this book, Emmanuel Alloa offers a handrail for venturing into the complexities of the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). Through a comprehensive analysis of the three main phases of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking and a thorough knowledge of his many unpublished manuscripts, the author traces how Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy evolved and exposes the remarkable coherence that structures it from within.
Alloa teases out the continuity of a motive that traverses the entire oeuvre as a common thread. Merleau-Ponty struggled incessantly against any kind of ideology of transparency, whether of the world, of the self, of knowledge, or of the self’s relation to others.
Already translated into several languages, Alloa’s innovative reading of this crucially important thinker shows why the issues Merleau-Ponty raised are, more than ever, those of our time.
This challenging yet engaging work is part and parcel of a vanguard of creative new scholarship that carries forward Merleau-Ponty's late thought so as to address contemporary philosophical concerns. What specifically it challenges is the ‘ideology of transparency’ that informs the Western understanding of embodiment, perception, language, and art. The book opens up new perspectives for a phenomenological ontology of ‘transphenomenality’ and ‘co-belonging.’---—Veronique Foti, Pennsylvania State University
Resistance of the Sensible World is a work of substance and erudition that focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s central themes of perception, language, and ontology. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of new scholarship on this enduringly pertinent phenomenologist.---—Richard M. Shusterman, author of Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics
Emmanuel Alloa's insightful book compellingly shows how Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is oriented by a resistance manifest in things and the sensible world... Alloa's book will be an important touch point on themes of resistance, passivity, and method in Merleau-Ponty.---Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
...If Alloa’s book only partly succeeds in its aim, it is nonetheless an astonishing achievement. He distils thousands of pages of visionary published and unpublished work into one hundred lucid and insight-packed pages. Anyone with an interest in Merleau-Ponty will benefit from reading it. For readers with some knowledge of Merleau-Ponty’s influences seeking a concise introduction to his work, or for those familiar with one phase of his work seeking a window onto the other aspects of his thought, I know of no better resource.---Dave Ward, Modern Humanities Research Association
The book is in many ways a tour de force... Alloa manages to expound a certain methodological coherence—the logic at work that emerges through the “continuities and discontinuities” that run through Merleau-Ponty’s work.---Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
Emmanuel Alloa's Resistance of the Sensible World is certainly among the very best works on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty.---Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal
Emmanuel Alloa is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and Senior Research Fellow at the NCCR Eikones.
Renaud Barbaras (Foreword By)
Renaud Barbaras is Chair of Contemporary Philosophy at the Sorbonne.