메를로-뽕띠(Merleau-Ponty)의 현상학적 신체론과 페미니즘

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of the Body and Some Feminist Responses

This essay purports to examine Merleau-Ponty's existential philosophy of the body in The Phenomenology of Perception and assess the responses to his theory raised by some feminists. Merleau-Ponty posits a new philosophy of the body that locates the subjectivity and consciousness in the lived body, rendering human subjectivity the embodied subject and consciousness embodied consciousness. It is only through the body that human beings exist, act, love, think, plan, formulate projects and interact with other people and things in the world. This move to situate subjectivity in the lived body radically challenges the dualistic perspective inherent in the traditional Western philosophy and empirical science prevailing in his times, and makes it impossible to preserve the mutual exclusivity of the categories subject and object, inner and outer, I and the world and mind and body. Many feminists have welcomed the disruption of the mind/body dualism and the emphasis on the significance of the body in human existence in Merleau-Ponty's theory, since in the traditional metaphysics the body as a devalued term had been associated with women, while men had occupied the position of the transcendental, rational, and transparent consciousness. On the other hand, they also argue that his theory of the body exclusively deals with a universalized, gender-neutral and thereby male body, and consequently ignores the specifically gendered experience of the female body. In this essay, I want to argue that Mereleau-ponty's theory of the body always posits "a situated body" which encom passes concrete historical, cultural and social situations and therefore opens to the analysis of the particular bodies including the female body.