Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews //
Emmanuel Alloa, Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty, Jane Todd (tr.), Fordham University Press, 2017, 128pp., $28.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780823275687.
Reviewed by David Morris, Concordia University
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. This resistance counters philosophical efforts at seeking (at least in principle) fully clarified accounts of things, others, and ourselves. Where ideologies of transparency (12) encounter this resistance as a problem, Merleau-Ponty finds it integral to philosophy, animating philosophical questions and granting philosophy things to think about in the first place. In effect, Merleau-Ponty recasts the transcendental condition of philosophy as an as yet indeterminate resistance operative prior to philosophy that can never be fully exhausted by it. Alloa's conclusion pushes these results about resistance beyond Merleau-Ponty, to show how they require a methodological transformation of philosophy.
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