![]() ![]() I stress the word beginnings, since this essay limits itself to a discussion of how Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, offers a way of privileging and elaborating a problem-the problem of liminality-that I would argue is implicitly raised but not resolved in Being and Nothingness. (2) Through its focus on liminality, the following analysis provides the beginnings of the interpretation LaCapra suggests. My analysis follows the lead of intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra who once remarked that 'he problems of ambiguity, supplementarity, play, among others might provide the basis for a reinterpretation of the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre in terms not entirely exhausted by the more restricted political issues that divided them'. I argue that while Merleau-Ponty makes it possible to 'think the liminal', Sartre, at least in Being and Nothingness, implicitly engages the problem of liminality but does not allow it to overturn the dualism at the heart of his ontology. At its centre is the term 'liminality', a descriptor for an ontological position that might straddle and thus mediate between the dichotomous positions of being-for-itself and being in-itself as theorised by Sartre, and, in so doing, might also deepen our understanding of other Sartrean dualisms, most notably that of 'being' and 'nothingness'. (1) The present essay is an attempt to develop a theoretical framework through which to interpret this basic difference between the two thinkers. As is well-known, Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) emphasized the dualistic, oppositional, and even antagonistic relationship between human consciousness and the world inhabited by consciousness, while Merleau-Ponty, in texts such as Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Visible and the Invisible (1964, posthumous), conceptualised a kind of originary communion between consciousness and world that stressed their imbrication rather than their separateness. Despite their common roots in the phenomenological tradition, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty differed markedly in the way they formulated the problem of being-in-the-world. ![]()
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