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(2010) Sartre on the body, Dordrecht, Springer.
Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, touch and the "double sensation'
Dermot Moran
pp. 41-66
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre includes an extraordinary, groundbreaking chapter on "the body' which treats of the body under three headings: "The body as being for-itself: facticity', "The body-for-others' and "The third ontological dimension of the body'. While the influence of this chapter on Merleau-Ponty has been acknowledged, Sartre's phenomenology of the body has in general been neglected. In this chapter, I want to examine Sartre's debt to Husserl and, in particular, how he departs from Merleau-Ponty especially in his critical treatment of the "double sensation' (the experience of one hand touching the other) which is central to Merleau-Ponty's conception of "intertwining', but which Sartre regards as a non-essential, merely contingent feature of our embodiment. I shall argue that Sartre, even more than Merleau-Ponty, is the phenomenologist par excellence of the flesh (la chair) and of intersubjective intercorporeality while emphasizing that touching oneself is a merely contingent feature and not "the foundation for a study of corporeality'.
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Full citation:
Moran, D. (2010)., Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, touch and the "double sensation', in K. J. Morris (ed.), Sartre on the body, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 41-66.
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