ABSTRACT
While Lévinas introduces us to the transcendent other to whom we are responsible, bringing up questions about freedom, limit and responsibility, and Ricœur states phenomenology in a hermeneutic way that reads bodied experience through narrative, still little is said about the body itself. Here is where Maurice Merleau-Ponty enters the scene. This chapter assesses the discourses on subjectivity offered by Lévinas and Ricœur. It then delves into how Merleau-Ponty’s identification of phenomenology as perception can help make sense of the body-based definitions of trauma. He suggests that philosophy has done a good job in analysing parts of life, but it has done quite a poor job in unifying existence. By this, he means that he is particularly interested in the pre-rational experience of the body as perception, touching and being touched by the world it inhabits. In defining trauma according to a pre-rational experience of the world, Merleau-Ponty helps us to understand how the bodied experience of sense offers an interpretive structure through which trauma affects the very constitution of subjectivity.
