Abstract
What, if anything, does a phenomenologist like Maurice Merleau-Ponty have to say about philosophical Eurocentrism, in a tradition pervaded by Eurocentric assumptions and which hqs equated Europe and universalism, from Husserl to Heidegger, including Merleau-Ponty himself? This paper divides Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies of universality in order to draw on conceptual resources which effectively displace, rather than reproduce, the logic of Eurocentrism. A critique of Merleau-Ponty’s lateral universality allows a more discreet, and yet more radical, universality to emerge: aesthetic universality.
First, the paper examines a classical reading of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution against Eurocentrism in scholarship which focuses on the essay “Everywhere and Nowhere” in Signs, in which Merleau-Ponty engages in a critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism through the concept of “lateral universality”. However, I argue that this concept remains caught up in a Husserlian variation of Eurocentrism, which still conceives of Europe as a space of truth and hence as a universal space. Against this Eurocentric universalism, the paper then develops the concept of an aesthetic universality through original archival work of his unpublished manuscripts and a critical reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s ontological writings, notably Eye and Mind and The Visible and The Invisible. This aesthetic universality derives from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology five core characteristics which constitute aesthetic universality:
- conceptlessness;
- grounded/lessness;
- embodiment;
- intertwinement;
- anarchy.
I argue that this ontological structure disrupts the logic of Eurocentrism in three fundamental ways. The aesthetic logic prevents an ordering of bodies by presenting a radical, i.e., non-anthropocentric equality of sensibility; it rethinks the development of institutions as body politics; and it displaces a Eurocentric identification of exemplarity by stripping normativity from the (political) example. This paper therefore recasts Merleau-Ponty as operating an internal displacement of phenomenology towards a political aesthetics which seriously contends with the logic of Eurocentrism in continental philosophy.
Biographical Note
Andréa is a third-year PhD candidate at the European Institute, LSE, and an Associate Fellow at the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies at the university of Essex. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Centre for Contemporary European Philosophy (CCEP) at the university of Radboud. Her research focuses on the interrelations of the concept of Europe and universalism, especially in phenomenological discourses. She explores the tensions between a hope for universal bodies and the embodied exclusions from that discourse. Her research has been published by Research in Phenomenology and Politeja.
