Expressing corporeal silence: phenomenology, merleau-ponty, and posthumanism

Abstract

The question for this article is not whether phenomenology is posthumanist in the sense that it is attendant to the bifurcations and exclusions inherent within humanism. Neither is it to trace this within posthumanism, broadly, as a form of criticism and analysis. Rather, the point is to demonstrate how phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s work, can contribute to addressing questions concerning subjectivity and corporeality in contemporary posthumanist discourse. More radically, it seeks to disclose how phenomenology, particularly existential phenomenology in its Merleau-Pontyan mode, signals a beginning of posthumanist philosophy, or, rather, of posthumanist forms of philosophizing.