The question of painting

rethinking thought with Merleau-Ponty

Jorella Andrews

The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought-an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, ethical, and indeed scientific possibilities. Taking an approach that moves between the fields of philosophical and visual culture research, The Question of Painting is organized around a closely focused, chronological account of Merleau-Ponty's unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally “intercorporeal” basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications-implications that have a, productive bearing on the personal, ethical and political challenges facing us today.