Abstract
This book is an interdisciplinary work in environmental humanities that puts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy into dialogue with evolutionary biology, animal studies, and literature, arguing for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals. It departs from most philosophic and critical animal studies which retain the traditional view of human exceptionalism. Differing from other studies of Merleau-Ponty’s work, this book emphasizes his lifelong attention to science, showing how his examination of evolutionary biology, embryology, and ethology anticipated recent studies of animal behavior, cognition, and communication. Each chapter explores literary questioning of human-animal relations from The Epic of Gilgamesh and Euripides’s Bacchae to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Chapter 1 introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment and dynamic intersubjectivity and chiasm in the context of the phenomenology introduced by Husserl and his proté;gé; Heidegger, with special emphasis on Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with science. Chapter 2 examines his exploration of animal studies and human animality, in which he insists that there is no evolutionary rupture between our species and other animals but instead a “strange kinship.” The final chapter explores Merleau-Ponty’s theory of language as embodied and gestural, placing it in the context of animal communication, especially among apes. It closes by examining his view that literature and the other arts are a distinctively human manifestation of the sedimentation of experience produced by all life forms on the planet. Here he anticipated the findings of biosemiotics.
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