Exactitude and partiality: Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on cinema

Abstract

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to questions of perception, subjectivity and objectivity, embodiment and movement, permeate a great number of contemporary reflections on cinema. The critical and explicatory force of the theoretical frameworks founded on Merleau-Ponty’s work are often deployed in discussions of ontology of cinema, spectatorship, cinematic sensoriality, and affect. In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on cinema, as best suited “to express man in his visible conduct…thought by gestures, man by behavior, the soul by the body,” is often invoked as the most lucid and powerful alternative to Deleuze’s Bergsonism. While it is not impossible to imagine some reconciliation between Merleau-Ponty and Bergson, or Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze , the former’s work is often used in an attempt to define cinema—its aesthetic codes and value for philosophy—beyond the confines of Deleuze’s framework. Considering the relative scarcity of explicit references to cinema in Merleau-Ponty’s writing, the phenomenological school in film theory is largely built on the foundations of his Phenomenology of Perception, the essay “Eye and Mind,” and the unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.