This article reconfigures Merleau-Ponty’s “Problem of Passivity” into the potential of passivity. It contributes to Claude Lefort’s strong claims that Merleau-Ponty’s Passivity course from 1954-1955 published in the volume of course notes Institution and Passivity provides an «attack against the root of modern ontology», and that the phenomenon of passivity has largely been «neglected by most philosophers». Reflected in these assertions is a 21st century perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s work, with relevance to current performative, corporeal and political reworkings of phenomenology. The (...) article's aim is to chart how Merleau-Ponty’s work on passivity, sleep and the unconscious represents a powerful critique of the Husserlian intentional model and the phenomenological concept of constitution, at the same time as opening potential for viewing consciousness as plural, culturally situated and diffracted. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the dynamic between Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Irigaray's strategy of mimesis is a powerful feminist tool, both philosophically and politically. Regarding textual engagement as analogous for relations between self and other beyond the text, I deliver a cautionary message: mimetic strategy is powerful but runs the risk of silencing the voice of the other.