Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Philosophie--Nice, 2002.

Thesis advisor: John Sallis / The present dissertation explores the motif of gesture and demonstrates that it encompasses the resonances between the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. My thesis specifically is that the notion of gesture articulates the problems of art and language, revealing fundamental convergences in the ways in which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty investigate a non-metaphysical approach to the sensible and question the limits of philosophy. I develop this argument by closely following Merleau-Ponty's reading of Heidegger's works in the lecture-notes from his courses at the Collège de France. I also rely heavily on Heidegger's reflections on gesture and the body as they are depicted in the Zollikon seminars, considering that some of these reflections retrieve crucial arguments from Being and Time and that they bear a significant resemblance to Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the body. In this way, I elucidate what may be called the gestural character of the work of art and language, establishing structural connections between the texts of these two thinkers. This dissertation is divided into three parts. I devote the first part to the themes of the body and gesture and show that the concept of form and the problem of perception lead to questions concerning the possibilities of a phenomenology of the body. I conclude this part by arguing that, for both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the notion of gesture corresponds to a phenomenological approach to the body as openness to the world and as an affective milieu. Departing from the arguments and comparisons delineated in the first part, in the second and third parts I examine separately the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in order to determine the settings of the notion of gesture within their respective approaches to art and language. The second part treats problems concerning the sensible character of the work of art, arguing that gestures perform a poetical disclosure of nature. In the third part I focus on questions of language and demonstrate that gestures unfold what could be called the logos of the sensible, which constitutes the primary source of language and meaning. I conclude by interpreting Heidegger's work as a gestural philosophy that emphasizes the performative dimension of language, an emphasis that is missing from Merleau-Ponty's work. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

This dissertation is an empirically responsive philosophical exploration into the incorporation of technological tools within a framework comprising the structures of experience laid out in the early phenomenological tradition and an analysis of agency drawing from the analytical tradition. Technological tools have become so deeply integrated in our lives that they function like a part of us, transforming what we feel we can do and even who we are. Although new spaces of autonomous agency have been opened up, since the inner workings of technological tools can remain invisible, we risk diminishing our own capacities. Since we are fundamentally embedded in the world, we cannot understand ourselves without reference to the world and we cannot understand the world without reference to the way we are. The uniqueness involved in our use of technological tools grows out of a more primordial uniqueness that makes technological tool use possible and sets us apart from our closest evolutionary relatives. Several animals extend their physical influence on the environment by means of tools. We humans, however, use tools to extend our cognitive abilities as well. And since the computer is the most universal human tool, which can be put to sensorimotor and cognitive purposes alike, we take the computer to be...

Part 1: ‘True Receivers': Rilke and the Contemporary Poetics of Listening In this part of this thesis I argue that a contemporary ‘poetics of listening' has emerged in the UK, and explore the writing of three of our most significant poets - John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson - to find out why they have become interested in the idea of the poet as a ‘listener'. I suggest that the appeal of this listening stance accounts for their engagement with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who thought of himself as a listening ‘receiver'; it is proposed that Rilke's notion of ‘receivership' and the way his poems relate to the earthly (or the ‘non-human') also account for the general ‘intensification' of interest in his work. An exploration of the shifting status of listening provides context for this study, and I pay particular attention to the way innovations in audio and communications technology influenced Rilke's late sequences the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. A connection is made between Rilke's ‘listening poetics' and the ‘listening' stance of Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas; this establishes a ‘listening lineage' for the contemporary poets considered in the thesis. I also suggest that there are intriguing similarities between the ideas of listening that are emerging in contemporary poetics and Hélène Cixous' concept of ‘écriture féminine'. Exploring these similarities helps us to understand the implications of the stance of the poet-listener, which is a counter to the idea that as a writer you must ‘find your voice'. Finally, it is proposed that ‘a poetics of listening' would benefit from an enriched taxonomy. Part 2 of the thesis is a collection of my poems entitled ‘Small Weather'.