7 - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Summary

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) was a key thinker in existential phenomenology of the twentieth century. He was active in the French Resistance during the Second World War. He taught at the École Normale Supérieure, the University of Lyons and the Sorbonne. From 1952 until his death he held the Chair of Philosophy at Collège de France. He was the co-editor (with Jean-Paul Sartre) of the journal Les Temps Modernes from 1945 to 1952. Merleau-Ponty wrote a number of books on the philosophy of perception, drawing from the phenomenological method of German philosopher Edmund Husserl. His works include The Structure of Behavior (1942; English trans. 1963), Phenomenology of Perception (1945; English trans. 1962), Humanism and Terror (1947; English trans. 1969), Sense and Non-Sense (1948; English trans. 1964), The Visible and the Invisible (1964; English trans. 1968) and The Prose of the World (1969; English trans. 1973). A number of his essays appear in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (1993).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote only one essay on film, yet his phenomenological approach informs problems of perception central to film. Taken up by some theorists as a welcome counterbalance to Marxist and psychoanalytic theories that tend to consider the film as text, a phenomenological approach provides a methodology for thinking through the perceptual experience of viewing (cf. Sobchack 1991: xvi).