The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness Merleau-Ponty and the Tasks of Thinking [Hardcover]

Addressing Merleau-Ponty's workPhenomenology of Perception, in dialogue withThe Visible and the Invisible, his lectures at the Coll??ge de France, and his reading of Proust, this book argues that at play in his thought is a philosophy of ???ontological lateness???. This describes the manner in which philosophical reflection is fated to lag behind its objects; therefore an absolute grasp on being remains beyond its reach.

Merleau-Ponty articulates this philosophy against the backdrop of what he calls ???cruel thought???, a style of reflecting that seeks resolution by limiting, circumscribing, and arresting its object. By contrast, the philosophy of ontological lateness seeks no such finality-noapocalypsisor unveiling-but is characterized by its ability to accept the veiling of being and its own constitutive lack of punctuality. To this extent, his thinking inaugurates a new relation to the becoming of sense that overcomes cruel thought. Merleau-Ponty's work gives voice to a wisdom of dispossession that allows for the withdrawal of being.

Never before has anyone engaged with the theme of Merleau-Ponty's own understanding of philosophy in such a sustained way as Whitmoyer does in this volume.

1. Introduction

Part I: Cruel Thought

2. First Chapter, Interrogation, Cruel Thought and Inquisition
3. Second Chapter, Cruel Thought and the Object
4. Third Chapter, Cruel Thought and a Consciousness Without Fissures
5. Fourth Chapter, Transcendental Contamination and the Permanent Dissonance of Being

Part II: The Deflagration of Sense

6. Fifth Chapter, Le sentir and the Genesis of Sense: Perceptual Synthesis and Temporality
7. Sixth Chapter, Temporality disparue
8. Seventh Chapter, Freedom and Lateness to Becoming

Part III: Philosophy of Weakness,lÓ)