Challenging a prevalent Western idea of the self as a discrete, interior consciousness, Scott L. Marratto argues instead that subjectivity is a characteristic of the living, expressive movement establishing a dynamic intertwining between a sentient body and its environment. He draws on the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, contemporary European philosophy, and research in cognitive science and development to offer a compelling investigation into what it means to be a self.

An original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on subjectivity, drawing from and challenging both the continental and analytic traditions.

Drawing together theory and advanced empirical research from a variety of disciplines, this book offers a new multidisciplinary perspective on human interaction. It conceives of the living body in terms of its interaction with other bodies, and its openness to and engagement with the material and cultural world.

Examines the lived experience of social encounters drawing on phenomenological insights. Body/Self/Other brings together a variety of phenomenological perspectives to examine the complexity of social encounters across a range of social, political, and ethical issues. It investigates the materiality of social encounters and the habitual attitudes that structure lived experience. In particular, the contributors examine how constructions of race, gender, sexuality, criminality, and medicalized forms of subjectivity affect perception and social interaction. Grounded in practical, everyday experiences, this book provides a theoretical framework that considers the extent to which fundamental ethical obligations arise from the fact of individuals’ intercorporeality and sociality.

Rosalyn Diprose contends that generosity is not just a human virtue, but it is an openness to others that is critical to our existence, sociality, and social formation. Her theory challenges the accepted model of generosity as a common character trait that guides a person to give something they possess away to others within an exchange economy. This book places giving in the realm of ontology, as well as the area of politics and social production, as it promotes ways to foster social relations that generate sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences. The analyses in the book theorize generosity in terms of intercorporeal relations where the self is given to others. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and offering critical interpretations of feminist philosophers such as Beauvoir and Butler, the author builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

This book explores the nexus between gender, ageing and culture in dancers practicing a variety of genres. It challenges existing cultural norms which equate ageing with bodily decline and draws on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to explore alternatives for developing a culturally valued mature subjectivity through the practice of dance.

This book draws inspiration from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of intercorporeality to offer a new, multidisciplinary perspective on the body. By drawing attention to the body's ability to simultaneously sense and be sensed, Merleau-Ponty transcends the object-subject divide and describes how bodies are about, into, and within other bodies. Such inherent relationality constitutes the essence of intercorporeality, and the chapters in this book examine such relationality from a host of diverse perspectives. The book begins with an introductory chapter in which the editors review the current research on bodily interaction, and introduce the notion of intercorporeality as a potentially integrative framework. The first section then offers four chapters devoted to clarifying theoretical and developmental perspectives on intercorporeality. Section 2 contains three chapters that provide insight on intercorporeality from evolutionary, historical, and cross-sectional perspectives. In Section 3, four chapters examine the intercorporeal nature of meaning-making during human interaction. Section 4 then presents three chapters that explore the intercorporeal nature of multi-agent interactions and the role that non-animate bodies (i.e., objects) play in such interaction. Throughout all the chapters, the authors work to integrate research in their specific discipline into the larger, transdisciplinary notion of intercorporeality. This collection provides an indisputably unique perspective on bodies-in-interaction, while simultaneously offering an interdisciplinary way forward in contemporary scholarship on bodies, meaning, and interaction.