Maurice Merleau-Ponty Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Joseph Margolis

Critical Essay by Joseph Margolis

SOURCE: Margolis, Joseph. “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism.” In Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, edited by Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher, pp. 241-56. Albany: State University of New York Press.

In the following essay, Margolis discusses Merleau-Ponty's legacy to postmodernism.

One cannot report the relationship between postmodernism and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: there is none, certainly there is none in the ordinary sense in which Jean-François Lyotard embraces postmodernism and Jürgen Habermas rejects it.¹ Furthermore, even under the constraint of philosophical relevance, postmodernism is as much a puzzle as a would-be resolution of deeper puzzles; there is no single formula defining postmodernism that identifies it both accurately and in a philosophically productive way—certainly not Lyotard's notorious jibe:

I will use the term modern [he says] to designate any science that identifies it with reference to a metadiscourse … making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of...
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