ABSTRACT
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological elaboration of spatiality as the “spatiality of situation” is subjected to an interrogation of the account of embodiment upon which his claim depends. In particular, Merleau-Ponty’s conceptual inheritance of the “corporeal schema” is tracked from early twentieth-century psychology to later debates, which are marked by the question as to whether or not Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema can account for the many complexities of embodied experience, or whether an additional concept is required, i.e., the body image. The emergence of the debate regarding the corporeal schema and body image is indicative of an important tension: The very conditions for a possible distinction between corporeal schema and body image in terms of an examination of the ways these concepts operate in Merleau-Ponty’s and Fanon’s phenomenologies. Even though both thinkers are interested in a dialectic that accounts for the subject’s being-in-the-world as embodied and historical (a “spatiality of situation”), they locate this dialectic differently due to their differential situation vis-à-vis the histories of colonialism and the racial inscriptions of violence different “situations” produce. The debate of an implied distinction between corporeal schema and body image in Merleau-Ponty issues from a difficulty of establishing an implicatory structure between the pre-reflexive and representational aspects of the constitution of subjectivity that makes historical experience possible.
