Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty

The French philosopher Renaud Barbaras remarked that late in Maurice Merleau-Pontys career, The phenomenology of perception fulfills itself as a philosophy of expression. In Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology and Ontology, Vronique M. Fti addresses the guiding yet neglected theme of expression in Merleau-Pontys thought. She traces Merleau-Pontys ideas about how individuals express creative or artistic impulses through his three essays on aesthetics, his engagement with animality and the new biology in the second of his lecture courses on nature of 195758, and in his late ontology, articulated in 1964 in the fragmentary text of Le visible et linvisible (The Visible and the Invisible) . With the exception of a discussion of Merleau-Pontys 1945 essay Cezannes Doubt, Fti engages with Merleau-Pontys late and final thought, with close attention to both his scientific and philosophical interlocutors, especially the continental rationalists. Expression shows itself, in Merleau-Pontys thought, to be primordial, and this innate and fundamental nature of expression has implications for his understanding of artistic creation, science, and philosophy.