In this paper, I will investigate the potential of what I term Merleau-Ponty’s ‘situated phenomenology’ for an investigation of normality from within and from without. First, I will argue that the concept of situation in the Phenomenology of Perception demarcates Merleau-Ponty’s turn from a mere epistemological to a concrete critical phenomenology. Second, I will apply Merleau-Ponty’s concept of situation as being situated and as being in situation to an investigation of normality. In doing so, I endeavor to differentiate between lived and represented normality, a difference which in turn corresponds to an operative (immanent) and established (external) normativity. A situated account of normality thereby combines a phenomenological and a genealogical perspective. My aim is to provide a toolkit to investigate the intertwinement of represented and lived normality, that is, of being situated and being in situation.

This article opens with a discussion of incarceration in the time of Covid 19. The story of one of the inmates in the high-security prison of Puente Grande (Mexico) leads us back to the beginning of the fifteen-year-long imprisonment of an innocent and, with it, to a complex narrative. The story concerns the use of the juridical concepts of delincuencia organizada (organized crime), racketeering, and kidnapping. As a charge it has been repeatedly implemented in what has come to be called la fabricaciόn de culpables (the “manufacture of the guilty”) in Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, and Brazil. Although the legal terminology changes, false incarceration is hardly limited to Central and South America. This is therefore a cautionary tale about how charges – and people – are framed, and how the latter are tried on social and corporate media, even before their official trials begin.

This paper is one in a series of attempts on my part to think through one of the central challenges left to us by Merleau-Ponty’s sudden death in 1961: if we understand the turn, in his later writings, toward an ontology of the flesh as “a radical rethinking of the experience of belonging from within, [as] a phenomenology of being-of-the-world” (Landes 2020, 141), how are we to bear witness to such an experience? What modalities are called forth to do justice to this belonging? The task accrues existential and ethical weight when, at stake in our analyses, are historical and social structures like coloniality that normalize experience, perception, and sense-making while marginalizing others. It is my contention, in this article, that when the phenomenological inquiry becomes critical the question of modality becomes ethically central; how we bear witness to experiences of marginalization and the operations of power that produce them matters in that it risks reifying the same normative structures that predicate the oppression of many. With these questions and considerations in mind, in this article, I return to silence and propose that the mobilization of what I call “deep silences” can be a powerful tool for a critical phenomenology that bears witness without capitulating to the imperative of transparency norming the modern/colonial world system. Deep silence, in fact, designates signifying practices that do not primarily operate within the bounds of logocentrism and speech as the foundational principles of meaning, or that rely upon conceptual, analytical, and instrumental thinking, mobilizing instead the somatic, affective, and sensual dimensions of existence. In this article, I am primary concerned with the sense-making effected by the aesthetic as an instance of deep silence. Specifically, I focus on the image- and ritual-centered photographic documentaries of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, which, I suggest, challenge the hegemonic normativity of modern/colonial aesthetics, introducing the reader to other sensibilities wherein the distinction between theory and practice has no purchase and the multiplicity of creative expressions is recognized.

Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as both ground and frame, this paper develops a notion of mangrove time as a way to think through how blackness is lived in the violent temporality of anti-blackness. Specifically, I want to suggest that, through the frame of mangrove time, an errant relationship between lived blackness and its black past inserts temporal possibility in and beyond the inertia of white supremacy’s violently anti-black temporality. In other words, contrary to Fanon’s proclamation that only black abjection is to be found in a return to the past of lived blackness, I show that, out of a mangroved conception of temporality, linkages to a black past becomes more than the ontological weight at the core of Fanon’s notion of a historico-racial schema. In foregrounding his own linkage to the past, Fanon’s historico-racial schema determines the past as fixed under the weight of an anti-black time. However, mangrove time recalls what is perhaps hastily forgotten under this schema, which is that, even as lived blackness arrives on the scene of an anti-black imaginary “too late”, it is still able to ‘time travel’ – to zigzag between present and past in a way that rescues lived blackness from the structural determination of its past. As mangroved, this temporality is still one of pain, amputation and fragmentation. But it is also one that opens up this temporality to “imaginative variability”.

Much work has been done, recently, on the harms and benefits of shaming. One may argue, for example, that feeling shamed inherently alienates and forecloses, and thus quite harmful to a compulsorily social and futurally oriented creature. This does not, however, preclude the argument that shame is ethically useful, providing, at a very basic, felt level, the absolute prohibitions such a social, futural, creature requires. This paper does not claim to finally evaluate shame itself. Instead I look to Merleau-Ponty, seeking the fleshly and felt structures of the social world – of our innate proximity and intimacy, as well as our isolation and alienation – within the embodied phenomenon of being ashamed. From the contours of this spontaneous, yet admittedly dangerous, corporeo-social phenomenon, there is comes an intimation of an ethics of the flesh: one which compels us to at least attempt to heed the often opaque, even mysterious powers of our bodies, not only for the good of our intimate others, but for the good of entire peoples.

This article examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontological investigation of language in his recently published course notes Sur le problème de la parole of 1954. In the course notes, Merleau-Ponty approaches the relation between being and language: if our ontological thinking is thoroughly conditioned by the means of expression provided by our proper language, how are we then to understand its claims of universality? The article argues that the course notes elucidate the linguistic turn in Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology. In particular, this article stresses that the course notes show that Merleau-Ponty undertakes an ontological inquiry into language before his investment into Heidegger’s philosophy. Furthermore, the course notes elucidate the continuity between Merleau-Ponty’s earlier investigations into expression and the ontological inquiry into language in his later texts.

In the “Temporality” chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty refers to the Kantian notion of “self-affection.” The subject has an affective self-relation through time because the subject is of time. Merleau-Ponty shows that it is crucial that self-affection is not understood as an immediate self-coincidence. According to him, the idea of an immediate self-possession renders self-relation impossible. Instead, temporal self-relation should be understood as a paradox of connection and difference: the contact of the self to itself always also implies distance. The temporal subject is not transparent to itself but has a connection to its past and its future through the temporal thickness of the present.

The interpretive approach adopted in this paper is influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and in particular by his understanding of Nature, which in turn takes into consideration Whitehead’s work. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is seen by its author as the metaphysical generalization of problems found in his investigation of natural knowledge. Whitehead admits that a speculative approach is necessitated by the very questions arising from the mathematical concepts of the material world and the revolutions undergone in logic, mathematics and physics at the turn of the century.Whitehead’s understanding of nature is framed from the beginning in terms of a processual approach. However, this notion of process is not fully worked out in the epistemological works and requires a metaphysical deepening. This is due to the fact that the notion of duration adopted in the epistemological works is not sufficient to convey the notion of process. This lack of adequacy is coupled by Whitehead with the need to interpret process in terms of experience. In turn, this notion of experience is wider than the usual one, for it implies that there is experience from the lowest levels onwards. Matter itself experiences. Seen in this perspective, reality is thus conceived in terms of a whole in constant change, whose parts are in mutual connection. This conception derives from Whitehead’s criticism of Aristotle’s substantialism and from his preference for a relationist ontology. The outcome of this approach is a speculative conception of reality in terms of a twofold notion of process: concrescence and transition, which Whitehead sees as the two faces of the creative advance of nature. This dual notion of process is interpreted in this essay in a merleau-pontyan perspective.

Taking its point of departure from Husserl’s recognition that consciousness is intentional, and Sartre’s concomitant non-reificatory notion of consciousness, understood therefore as not a thing, or as nothingness, definitive of human identity, the article proceeds by asking how, if this is so, is it possible to become conscious of consciousness, which is to say reflectively self-conscious. Explicating the relationship between the reflective mirroring of the Self to the Self, as reflected in “the look of the Other,” and the self’s unmediated or immediate self-recognition, the article proceeds to evaluate each, before providing reasons for the perhaps somewhat startling conclusion that it is our view of the world that is apt to reflect our most authentic image of ourselves to us. While exploring the implications of this, the article concludes by investigating the role of intellectual or rational reflection in ensuring our freedom of choice, and consequent responsibility, for who we choose to be.