ABSTRACT
Merleau-ponty begins with a fundamental presumption, not of a Cartesian dualism of mind and body but of their necessary interrelatedness. He claims that phenomenology wants to understand the relations between consciousness and nature and between inferiority and exteriority. For Merleau-Ponty, although the body is both object (for others) and a lived reality (for the subject), it is never simply object nor simply subject. His emphasis on lived experience and perception, his focus on the body-subject, has resonances with what may arguably be regarded as feminism’s major contribution to the production and structure of knowledges—its necessary reliance on lived experience, on experiential acquaintance as a touchstone or criterion of the validity of theoretical postulates. Merleau-Ponty inherited the soul as Being and as Nothingness and set out alone to do what none before him—or since him—could think to do; first, he made the soul a thing, a body, and then, he incarnated all things into the Flesh.
