The Grotesque and Merleau-Ponty on "Fleshing Out" the Subject

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Merleau-Ponty's concept of subjectivity can be analyzed in a new way by examining it through the figuration of the grotesque. I shall demonstrate how the new subject proposed by Merleau-Ponty may be better understood by aligning it with the grotesque subject. I shall be arguing that the grotesque figuration succeeds in presenting the subject the way Merleau-Ponty had tried to conceive of it, namely, as embodied, strongly rooted in concreteness and yet ambiguously intertwined with the world and the others.

Phenomenology has carried out a deep critique of the concept of the subject and its identity as it appears in different classical and modem philosophical theories. In this …