"Merleau-Ponty is a deep influence; one can feel him tumbling around in the back seat of much of Butler’s thinking."
— Parul Sehgal (b.1981)
Author
Date
April 29, 2024
Metaphor
"Merleau-Ponty is a deep influence; one can feel him tumbling around in the back seat of much of Butler’s thinking."
Metaphor in Context
Butler apologized for the mess in their car, an old BMW, when we went for a drive one day—this amounted to a few books by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, strewn around the back seat. Butler’s marginalia in those books are in a precise, hunched hand. Merleau-Ponty propounded the idea that the body, not consciousness, is our primary instrument for understanding the world. To be in a body is not to be contained but to be exposed to the world; from our first breath, we are in need of care from other people. Merleau-Ponty is a deep influence; one can feel him tumbling around in the back seat of much of Butler’s thinking. “I am open to a world that acts on me in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled in advance, and something about my openness is not, strictly speaking, under my control,” they have said.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Parul Sehgal, "Who's Afraid of Judith Butler?" The New Yorker (April 29, 2024). <Link to www.newyorker.com>
Date of Entry
05/16/2024
