The Body as a Work of Art: the Haptic Character of Cinematographic Perception in Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

Considering that corporeality is central to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work, we will explore the possibility of conceiving a phenomenological aesthetic based on the haptic nature of vision, using cinematographic perception as a backdrop, understood as the "affective space" of intersubjectivity. To this end, alongside Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we will draw on other thinkers and artists who have considered or explored, through artistic means, this haptic dimension of the body, or the intrusion of vision and touch (haptic perception) into a space, an atmosphere, that is always emotional. Our goal is simply to show that, beyond more ontological, phenomenological, political, or cognitivist approaches, there can also be an aesthetic dimension in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, a dimension that has become more coherent and developed, particularly through the work of a new generation of researchers. Therefore, starting from a non-philosophy as true philosophy and arriving at the carnal body as the "exemplary sensible" of the structure of all being, we will seek to postulate the hypothesis of "haptic vision" as a fundamental expression of our being-in-the-world (ontological), as an opening, through desire, to the sensitive sense of the truth of events. Thus, our objective will simply be to see to what extent the expression "haptic vision" can inaugurate a new understanding of sensibility (aisthÄ“sis) and to what extent we can think of it philosophically from the "ontological rehabilitation of the sensible" (Merleau-Ponty). In this sense, art is an unsurpassed point of reference, for it offers us multiple "ways of seeing" (John Berg), that is, of seeing the seeing and seeing oneself (specular and reversible dimension of tactile or haptic vision), and of feeling our own existence in diverse ways, of inhabiting it beyond ourselves, not only with vision, but carnally, as the primordial revelation of human intercorporeal coexistence.