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The International Merleau-Ponty Circle is an organization of students, professors, and scholars interested in the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It was founded in 1976 and convenes once a year, usually in late summer or early fall, at various colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. During this annual three day conference, philosophers, psychologists, historians, social scientists, health care specialists, political theorists, artists and like-minded professionals present papers on different aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as well as its interrelations with recent Continental philosophy and theory.  Conference directors have often arranged for publication of conference papers. There are approximately 750 members in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Australia and Africa.

Membership in the Circle is open and you can also join our Facebook group. Donations to the M. C. Dillon Memorial Fund can be made here. See our page about the Circle for further information, or contact our General Secretary, Prof. David Morris, david.morris@concordia.ca, Concordia University, Montreal, or our Associate General Secretary, Prof. Kym Maclaren, kym.maclaren@ryerson.ca, Toronto Metropolitan University. Any questions or concerns about this website should be directed to IMPC webmaster Rawb Leon-Carlyle, rawb@psu.edu.

IMPC 47: Merleau-Ponty and Embodiment: Between the Cognitive, Aesthetic, and Socio-Political

47TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL MERLEAU-PONTY CIRCLE

Dec 4th – Dec 6th 2023 | Deakin University, Melbourne/Naarm, Australia | Hybrid; in-person (Deakin Downtown) and virtual (AEDT)

“Le corps est notre moyen général d’avoir un monde. / The body is our general means of having a world.”

Merleau-Ponty’s seminal work on embodiment has been of enduring interest and influence in a wide range of fields. Although sometimes criticised for providing an account of embodiment that is too general, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical foregrounding of embodiment has also facilitated critical phenomenological studies attending to the specificities of how particular bodies inhabit social and political environments, through considerations of race, gender, disability, ageing, and illness.

This year’s meeting of the IMPC seeks to bring together these rich and varied strands of enquiry, in order to think with, against, and beyond Merleau-Ponty’s own contributions on the lived body.

Keynote speakers include:
• Professor Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis, University of Wollongong)
• Associate Professor Alia Al-Saji (McGill University)

Invited speakers include:
• Associate Professor Kym Maclaren (Toronto Metropolitan University)
• Professor Claude Romano (Paris-Sorbonne University)
• Assistant Professor Joel Michael Reynolds (Georgetown University)

Additional details about the conference program, including the conference schedule and abstracts and presenter bios for both conference streams are all available here.

Registration is available here.

In addition, we are pleased to announce that this year’s conference will also inaugurate a second prize, the Ron Morstyn Memorial Prize. This prize was established, through a generous donation from Gaye Morstyn, to honour Ron’s dedication to phenomenology and its potential for bettering our understanding of the human condition. It is awarded annually, to a graduate student, junior scholar, or independent scholar, for the best interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary paper engaging Merleau-Ponty’s work at the Circle. (To be eligible as a junior scholar, your PhD must have been earned within the last five calendar years.) The prize is presented as both an honor and a monetary award of $1000 USD. If you are eligible for the prize and wish to be considered for it, indicate this in your cover letter when submitting your paper for consideration for the conference. Graduate students with interdisciplinary papers may ask to have their paper considered for both the Morstyn and Dillon prizes. If you have already submitted a paper and wish for it to be considered for this prize, please advise Dr Ngo and Prof Reynolds.

PhP Around the World

The International Merleau-Ponty Circle and Chiasmi International are mounting a project to solicit and curate a series of video broadcasts about this book, from around the world. The Phenomenology of Perception Around the World: A 75th Anniversary Broadcast Series is meant to echo Merleau-Ponty’s own 1948 radio broadcasts about philosophy, dedicated to the topic of the world as revealed by phenomenology, and transcribed in Causeries 1948 and translated in The World of Perception. The series videos are available on Vimeo here.

Moral Horizons of Pain, the tenth philosophy video in the series on Phenomenology of Perception Around the World, is ready to launch! The launch features the video’s world premiere, followed by a discussion with the makers of the film, Santanu Dutta, Ariel Ducey, Martina Kelly, Pratim Sengupta (Canada). The discussion will be hosted by David Morris (Canada). This will be followed by a question and answer session with attendees. The launch is via a Zoom meeting, on 23 September, 13:00h-14:30h EST (Montreal). It is free but requires registration. 

Moral Horizons of Pain offers a critical phenomenological re-orientation of medical diagnosis and caring for pain. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s notions of first and second order perceptions and Ahmed’s notion of orientations, the team of interdisciplinary scholars in sociology, learning sciences and medicine reveal hidden moral undertones underpinning technoscientific practices in medicine.

Circle Announcements

Engrenage or the Art of Translation

The International Merleau-Ponty Circle invites you to view Engrenage or the Art of Translation, a series of watercolours created by IMPC scholar Donald A. Landes (translator of the 2012 English edition of The Phenomenology of Perception and author of Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression and The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary). This series of watercolours was presented in conjunction with Landes’s keynote address at the 45th annual meeting of the IMPC.

As Landes notes, “The expression carves out that negative space, and the vestige of the expressive act invites an ‘engrenage’ or ‘gearing into,’ a reperformance—that is, a translation. In this series of watercolors, I explore engrenage. The material vestige of the expression (the book, the painting) is represented by the first graphite line, but the fluidity of the metastable virtual transgresses, effaces, or multiplies these edges. Each new reading or translation, expressed materially by the second line, attempts to s’engrener with the original, but not in the sense of material gears. Never fitting perfectly, leaving gaps, activating different parts of the virtual beyond the original boundaries, and reshaping the work in each of its iterations. Engrenage, then, is the art of translation—the art of communicating across difference in the face of the ever-evolving nature of the trajectories of sense we live.”

Those interested in Landes’s other watercolour meditations should also view Curfew, Curfew 2.39, and Edges (for Ed Casey).

Bibliography and New Releases

See our compiled bibliography of primary source works or our current bibliography of secondary source works for information about Merleau-Ponty work’s and scholarship on Merleau-Ponty. See below for new publications relevant to Merleau-Ponty and his work.

Conférences en Europe et premiers cours à Lyon: Inédits I (1946-1947)
Eds. Michel Dalissier & Shôichi Matsuba | 2022 | ISBN 9788869762345 | Mimésis

Conférences en Amerique, notes de cours et autres textes: Inédits II (1947-1949)
Eds. Michel Dalissier & Shôichi Matsuba | 2022 | ISBN 9788869762345 | Mimésis

La perception qui guérit
Desmond Kennedy | Tr. Olivier Winghart | 2020 | ISBN 9782913706910 | L’Exprimerie

Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy
Eds. Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, & Rajiv Kaushik | 2020 | ISBN 9781438476919 | SUNY Press

Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery
Véronique M. Fóti | 2020 | ISBN 9781438478036 | SUNY Press

The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953
Trans. Bryan Smyth | 2020 | ISBN 9780810141421 | Northwestern University Press

Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism
Rajiv Kaushik | 2019 | ISBN 9781438476759 | SUNY Press

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language
Dimitris Apostolopoulos | 2019 | ISBN 9781786611994 | Rowman & Littlefield

L’œil et l’histoire: Merleau-Ponty et l’historicité de la perception
Anna Caterina Dalmasso | 2019 | ISBN 9788869761966 | Éditions Mimesis

Chemins avec et autour de Merleau-Ponty
Jean-Yves Mercury | 2019 | ISBN 9782343188317 | Éditions Harmattan

50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology
Eds. Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, & Gayle Salamon | 2019 | ISBN 9780810141148 | Northwestern University Press

Bylaws and Directors

Membership in the Circle is unrestricted. Visitors are encouraged to review our bylaws or a list of the Board of Directors of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle.

 

Archive

Programs from previous IMPC conferences are accessible through our Archive.

The Forty-sixth Annual Conference of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle was held in-person and virtually from November 10-12, 2022, hosted by Georgetown University. The theme of the conference was “Fits and Misfits: Rethinking Disability, Debility, and the World with Merleau-Ponty” and was directed by Prof. Joel Michael Reynolds. The M. C. Dillon prize and lecture for the best graduate student paper submission was awarded to Gaia Ferrari (Duquesne University) for her paper “Entangled Embodiments: Merleau-Ponty’s Method for Grounding a Phenomenology of Disability”.