Publication Details

Abstract

This paper intends to demonstrate that, beginning with his analyses of dream and hallucination in Phenomenology of Perception up to his definition of dehiscence as ontological principle in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty holds the audacious assumption that the subject is thrown into a dreamlike and bewitched world and the self is diffracted into many reflections. It is, I will claim, a fundamental thesis in his philosophy inasmuch as it enables him to unveil and even radicalize the modern crisis and to pose a crucial ethical problem: if reason is not guaranteed and has to arise perilously from irrational depths, the self is threatened by inauthenticity, illusion and alienation; the existence is a strange dream which may anytime turn into a nightmare. I will also show that Merleau-Ponty reverses this crisis into an asset: a reality which includes a fundamental dimension of imaginary leaves us free to create new metamorphoses.