1. Fulminating Flesh and Progressive Politics: Finessing the Fold.
- Author
-
Coole, Diana
- Subjects
- *
PHENOMENOLOGY , *NEUROSCIENCES , *ONTOLOGY , *INTERSUBJECTIVITY , *DUALISM - Abstract
My paper is composed of three parts. In the first, I consider some connections between phenomenology, neuroscience and politics, examining the context of recent interest in these connections and offering some critical comments. On the basis of those criticisms I suggest an alternative departure in relating phenomenology and neuroscience to politics, via ontology. Since it is my intention to think from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the Flesh here, I devote the second part of the paper to sketching in some of the relevant background to his thinking, focusing in particular on the way he finessed the mind-body relation. These two parts constitute a necessary preamble, but it is in the third and final part of my paper that I develop a distinctive argument. Having presented Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the Flesh as a non-dualist ontology of generative immanence, I consider four ways of figuring the political that might express the way this ontology unfolds in collective life. The aim as I present it here is to achieve a thick theory of intersubjectivity and its mode of becoming, thereby avoiding some of the criticisms I made earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2002