Carnal Relations: Embodied Sight in Merleau-Ponty, Roger Bacon and St Francis

Abstract

This article attempts a medieval Christian rereading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic and unfinished text, The Visible and the Invisible. Along the way, it complicates current notions of ocularcentrism, as well as the idea of an embodied gaze. The privileged term in these historical fragments is flesh: in Merleau-Ponty and in medieval Christianity, a carnal presence insinuates itself into the relations between bodies, between things and thoughts, self and world. In the end, the speculative encounter between the two central studies offers a new perspective on debates about the historiography of vision and the peculiar potency of the visual world.

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