Gesture and Art in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

The present dissertation explores the motif of gesture and demonstrates that it encompasses the resonances between the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. My thesis specifically is that the notion of gesture articulates the problems of art and language, revealing fundamental convergences in the ways in which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty investigate a non-metaphysical approach to the sensible and question the limits of philosophy. I develop this argument by closely following Merleau-Ponty's reading of Heidegger's works in the lecture-notes from his courses at the Collège de France. I also rely heavily on Heidegger's reflections on gesture and the body as they are depicted in the Zollikon seminars, considering that some of these reflections retrieve crucial arguments from Being and Time and that they bear a significant resemblance to Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the body. In this way, I elucidate what may be called the gestural character of the work of art and language, establishing structural connections between the texts of these two thinkers. This dissertation is divided into three parts. I devote the first part to the themes of the body and gesture and show that the concept of form and the problem of perception lead to questions concerning the possibilities of a phenomenology of the body. I conclude this part by arguing that, for both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the notion of gesture corresponds to a phenomenological approach to the body as openness to the world and as an affective milieu. Departing from the arguments and comparisons delineated in the first part, in the second and third parts I examine separately the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in order to determine the settings of the notion of gesture within their respective approaches to art and language. The second part treats problems concerning the sensible character of the work of art, arguing that gestures perform a poetical disclosure of nature. In the third part I focus on questions of language and demonstrate that gestures unfold what could be called the logos of the sensible, which constitutes the primary source of language and meaning. I conclude by interpreting Heidegger's work as a gestural philosophy that emphasizes the performative dimension of language, an emphasis that is missing from Merleau-Ponty's work.