Reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception Part 4

The next meeting of the Merleau-Ponty reading group will take place on Thursday 2 February 2012 in G1, Laurie Grove Baths, Goldsmiths at 2pm.

We’ll be embarking on Part II The World as Perceived.

Discussion will be focused on ‘The theory of the body is already a theory of perception’, pp.235-9. and ‘Sense perception’, pp.240-282. (Routledge edition)

All Welcome.

Reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception Part 3

The Phenomenology of Perception reading group at the Centre for Cultural Studies will start up again in the new year. We’ll be looking at the two final sections of Part I on The Body. So far much of the discussion has been focused on how Merleau-Ponty might be used politically or ethically. I’ll try and write up my notes on this (which I suspect will take the form of a list of questions rather than a sustained narrative) when I get time.

The next meeting will take place on Thursday 12 January 2012 at 2pm.

G1, Laurie Grove Baths, Laurie Grove, New Cross, London.

Reading:

Part I. The Body

5. ‘The Body in its Sexual Being’, pp.178-201. (Routledge Edition)

6. ‘The Body as Expression, and Speech’, pp.202-232.

All Welcome.

Reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception Part 2

There is nothing hidden behind these faces and gestures, no domain to which I have no access, merely a little shadow which owes its very existence to light. (Preface to Phenomenology of Perception)

Thank you to everyone who attended the first reading group on Phenomenology of Perception - the Preface proved particularly rich in the questions it raised concerning science and history within the context in which Merleau-Ponty was writing.

More is definitely needed to be thought and said about his discussion memory - both with and against Bergson, perhaps, but also in relation to notions of collective and cultural memory.



 Merleau-Ponty perceiving something

The next reading group will take place on Thursday 8 December 2011, 2-4pm in G1, Laurie Grove Baths, Laurie Grove, New Cross, London.

We will be looking at PART 1. THE BODY but specifically:

‘Experience and Objective Thought. The Problem of the Body’(pp.77-83 in the Routledge Edition)

Chapter 3. ‘The Spatiality of One’s own Body and Motility’ (pp.112-170)

Chapter 4. ‘The Synthesis of One’s own Body’ (pp.171-177)

All Welcome. For more info contact: S.Fuggle @ gold.ac.uk

‘The world is not what I think, but what I live through.’

Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

A reading group dedicated to Merleau-Ponty’s fantastic yet generally underrated text will be taking place in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths.

The first meeting is set for Thursday 17 November, 2-4pm, G1 in Laurie Grove Baths, Laurie Grove, New Cross and will focus on the Preface and parts 1 (The ‘Sensation’ as a Unit of Experience) and 2 (‘Association’ and the ‘Projection of Memories’) of the Introduction.

All Welcome. Contact S.Fuggle @ gold.ac.uk for more info.

I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. (from the ‘Preface’ to Phenomenology of Perception, xviii-xix)