Dreamed – lived bodies: the body issue in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty

Author(s)

Fernando de Almeida Silveira

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Ribeirão Preto.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (PCARP/BC)
• Defense date: 2005-08-22

Examining board members

Reinaldo Furlan; Katia de Souza Amorim; Jose Lino Oliveira Bueno; Cléa Regina de Oliveira Ribeiro; Richard Theisen Simanke

• Advisor: Reinaldo Furlan

Abstract

Michel Foucault’s work highlights body as expression and support from forces of power and knowledge, which get strategically articulated, in occidental society’s history. Embodiment occupies a central position in Foucault’s work, which points it out as a bio-political-historical reality; that is, as “interpenetrated by history" and a point of support of complex forces correlations, over which fall upon multiple discursive conformations productive of truths that either can reaffirm as recreate the meaning of the present body, or an individual / collective sensibility immanent in it. In this case, it is not the autonomous epistemological subject who produces a useful or lonesome knowledge to the power, but the power-knowledge, the processes and fights which traverse it and that constitute it, and which represent the forms and possible fields of knowledge. In the proportion Foucault takes out from the autonomous subject of knowledge the central role in the process of knowledge production, the body acquires a renewal importance. The body is a piece within a domination and submission play which is present in the whole social net, which turns the body the depository of marks and signs that are inscribed in it, according to the impacts effectiveness, which for their turn has on embodiment its “rehearsal field". If compared with Foucault’s genealogy, Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is, for one side, more psychological; that is, it seeks to apprehend from inside as the body lives these senses. For the other side, Merleau-Ponty seeks the sensible experience as a region of senses that does not limit itself to historical-cultural meanings, as embodiment represents our opening to being in general. It is what he names as region of the raw Being. In this sense, the linguistic constructions of reality, also of the body itself, depart from one experience from which they cannot either open or close, as the meaning of the sensible experience always finds itself beyond language meanings; this would the reason we think, construct and “develop" languages. Due to the increasing importance of the body notions either on Merleau-Ponty’s or Michel Foucault’s work, this research project aims to compare Foucault’s discourse order with Merleau-Ponty’s lived description, to evaluate in which extent his genealogical perspective is capable to dissolve the subjective notion that resides on Merleau-Ponty’s proper body experience. It was verified that Foucault was the philosopher of the body entangled by power and knowledge forces, in the constitution of the subjects’ historic identity, relating it to the ruptures and discontinuities of tense collisions that ruin the historical body. In Merleau-Ponty, the embodiment enunciation refers to the grooming and the germinations, within the articulation of the proper body, while an originary stratum of the scientific and daily bodies, on their dehiscent relation. In another turn, it is only Merleau-Ponty that considers a joint articulation between entanglement and germinated body through which perception and subjetivation can be mutually alluded. In this direction, the attempt of Foucault, in his analytical, to submit Merleau-Ponty’s germinant body to the same discursive presupposition of his entangled body is a form of not considering the singularities of the enunciative landscape of the body in the Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Through bibliographic readings of the authors, commentators and other modern philosophy authors, through a transdisciplinar approach, which refers itself either to the Psychology or Philosophy field, as it analyzes the complex relation among the lived body and the process of the socio-historical construction of the modern subject. (FAPESP). (AU)