Claus Halberg
Assistant Professor
Centre for Womens and Gender Research
Title: Assistant Professor
Phone: +47 55 58 89 84
E-mail: Claus.Halberg@skok.uib.no
Visiting address: Allegt. 34
History of philosophy
French post-war philosophy
Philosophy and gender
KVIK 101
KVIK 201
EXPHILSEM-SV; alfa, beta
EXPHILSEM-JU; alfa
Wildly, Carnally Feminine
Excursions Into the Feminine Territories of Merleau-Ponty’s Thought
This project is concerned with the thought of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), with a view to how gendered, and particularly feminine, imagery plays a philosophically important role in his texts. To this end, his early philosophical study on the phenomenon of perception, entitled Phenomenology of Perception, as well as his posthumously edited and published late manuscript, published under the title The Visible and the Invisible and with Merleau-Ponty’s working notes appended, serve as principal sites of textual interrogation. The point of departure of the thesis is Merleau-Ponty’s statement, in The Visible and the Invisible, that philosophy is a “reconquest of brute or wild being”. The hypothesis I investigate and try to defend, by looking into how he interrogates the phenomena of perception, embodiment, language as well as the visual arts, is that his utilization of gendered and feminized imagery greatly facilitates this reconquest, insofar as he continuously and more or less systematically imputes feminine, and particularly maternal, characteristics to that which he names “wild being”.
On the surface the project comes across as purely an exegetic adventure across Merleau-Ponty’s textual corpus, and thus as a contribution to the ever expanding field of Merleau-Ponty scholarship, especially as the thematic focus of my thesis (gendered imagery) is far from being at the centre of attention in this field. Indirectly, however, the results obtained in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s texts might possibly have an exemplary or emblematic status with regard to other authors, more or less contemporary with Merleau-Ponty, who pose similar philosophical and ontological problems in a stylistically related fashion. Thus, in the spaces of similarity and difference between Merleau-Ponty’s and his contemporaries’ ways of feminizing their philosophical language one might perhaps glimpse the contours of a moment of intellectual history that is open to feminist analyses in a diversity of approaches.