Marratto, Scott., The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity

MARRATTO, Scott. The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012. xii + 242pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $24.95--Scott Marratto's excellent book is part of a new wave of scholarship that aims to demonstrate the importance of European philosophy with respect to questions within the analytic tradition, in this case the philosophy of mind. Here Marratto addresses the relationship between conscious experience and the body by taking up the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. There are two main audiences for this book--scholars working in the philosophy of mind and those who are interested in Merleau-Ponty's thought--since the text traces a fine line between contribution to contemporary conversations concerning the nature of subjectivity and commentary on MerleauPonty's Phenomenology of Perception. This review will focus upon what it has to offer each readership. For one audience, Marratto's book is a detailed meditation upon the limitations of contemporary philosophy of mind resulting from its inheriting a Cartesian conception of consciousness. Over the course of the book, Marratto establishes a different conception of the subject that eliminates the need to answer the more vexing questions about consciousness that only surface due to Cartesian assumptions. Chapter one offers reasons to favor models of embodied cognition, allying himself with the tradition within analytical philosophy that abandons Cartesianism. His original premise is that an ontological investigation into the naturalistic foundations of those positions yields an alternative version of embodied consciousness. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology provides that novel ontological foundation and is explained at length in chapter two. Because there are aspects of sensory experience that continue to exceed the explanatory capacity of current models of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy recommends understanding the embodied subject in terms of a body's unconscious, dynamic constitution of a vital situation for itself by means of living movement. Chapter three rejoins the discussion from the first in order to demonstrate how accepting Merleau-Ponty's ontological analysis alters current non-Cartesian forms of embodied cognition. The alternative naturalism Marratto advocates is most fully developed in the fifth chapter, wherein he solidifies his case that consciousness is best viewed as one of the many expressive functions of a body. For the other audience, the main virtue of Marratto's book is his innovative interpretation of Phenomenology of Perception that exonerates the thinker from criticisms levied by figures such as Derrida, Barbaras, and (implicitly) Irigaray. Since the intercorporeal subject only emerges through its encounter with otherness, both in itself and in its environment, his version of phenomenology does not rely on a transcendental consciousness. …