Corporeity and the Eurocentric community: recasting Husserl’s crisis in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh

Delestrade, Andréa (2024) Corporeity and the Eurocentric community: recasting Husserl’s crisis in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. Research in Phenomenology, 54 (2). 189 - 212. ISSN 0085-5553

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Abstract

This paper attempts to develop a phenomenological account of community which would not be pervaded by Eurocentric assumptions. Such Eurocentrism is what Husserl’s phenomenological framework has been accused of. I first reconstruct Husserl’s phenomenology of community in his late transcendental phenomenology by examining the Vienna Lecture. I show that Husserl’s Eurocentrism is encapsulated in his account of corporeity, which simultaneously recognizes the importance of corporeity and its necessary overcoming in theoria, which originates in the European philosopher. I then argue that Merleau-Ponty, through his rigorously embodied phenomenology, can offer a non-Eurocentric phenomenology of community. Elaborating on the Husserlian insight of corporeity, notably the perceptual experience and the écart at stake in the encounter with other bodies, allows Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh to recast community from and with the body as an open, situated, and non-archeo-teleological structure, allowing phenomenology to reimagine inter-cultural encounters away from tropes of European exemplarity.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://brill.com/view/journals/rip/54/2/rip.54.is...
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author
Divisions:	Government European Institute
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Date Deposited:	26 Jul 2024 11:06
Last Modified:	26 Jul 2024 16:03
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/124375

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