Abstract
The subject is a movement directed to the
outside, that is to say, the subject is desire. Desire
is the “tension” towards the “extrême dehors”
(Edmund Husserl) that we call the world. In all of
his works Maurice Merleau-Ponty reaffirms,
without thematizing it, a conception of life as
movement, and of body as action and desire: man
is “un certain manque de…”. In other words, it is
the distance between myself and the absent that
drives me to move, to annul the distance through
motion. As Jan Patočka writes, it is precisely
through movement that the subject inscribes
himself into the world and becomes visible to
others. Thus life is nothing but the unfinished act
of moving into space and thereby creating space – the space in which we, as desire and movement,
encounter both others and the world. As the act
of moving is the way one appears to another,
every relationship is based on appearing. In short,
life is the movement that leads us towards the
world and coincides with our desire to make it
appear. This desire, as Renaud Barbaras will
eventually claim, remains a longing.
References
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