Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism ed. by Ariane Mildenberg (review)

Ariane Mildenberg's edited volume is among the first (with volumes on Bergson and Deleuze) of a major new series of which the explicit aim is to stimulate and substantiate new conversations between influential philosophers, predominantly of the twentieth century, and the new, pluralized conception of modernism which has decoupled it from linear history and thought it more as a mode of literary and aesthetic production. Mildenberg's Introduction to the volume on Maurice Merleau-Ponty adds impetus to this aim through discerning important continuities between the processual nature of form in modernist works and aesthetics and the experiential incompletion which is a key feature of Merleau-Ponty's thought. The encounter between Merleau-Ponty and modernism is given added acuity moreover by the fairly recent phenomenological turn in critical theory and the return to Merleau-Ponty's work across a number of fields and tendencies, including queer phenomenology, medical humanities, animal studies, environmental studies, and new materialism. The many contributors to Mildenberg's carefully curated and substantial volume (with nineteen individually authored chapters in all) offer provocative and significant contributions to these ongoing conversations. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which, 'Conceptualizing Merleau-Ponty', focuses in the main on engaging the philosopher's thought with major interlocutors in the history of philosophy (Descartes, Husserl, Bergson). The breadth of Merleau-Ponty's work is addressed, including the unfinished work Le Visible et l'invisible, and there are also important accounts of the role of language and of painting (Cézanne specifically). The second and larger part of the volume, on 'Aesthetics and the Lived Body', includes twelve essays which revolve around questions of embodied experience and aesthetics, with meditations on concepts such as the imagination, ontology, perception, and temporality, and moving across different media—painting, literature (including poetry), film, and choreography. A salient thematic focus is the contribution of Merleau-Ponty's thought to environmental modernism. Of particular interest to scholars of French studies, beyond the importance of Merleau-Ponty himself, are: the chapter by Jessica Wiskus, which addresses Merleau-Ponty's writing on Proust and Claudel, the chapter by Sarah Cooper on the philosopher's influence on modernist theories of film, and Carole Bourne-Taylor's chapter, which looks at the dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Valéry. In addition to the many substantial and precise perspectives to be found in the first two parts of the volume, the third part offers a distinctively adventurous series of brief glossary entries, each of them nevertheless essays in their own right. While a feature of the series, in Mildenberg's volume the terms chosen include familiar keywords in Merleau-Ponty's thought ('flesh', 'chiasm', 'écart', 'lived experience'…), but also less obvious words ('Wild (Brute) Being', 'Ineinander' or 'in-one-another', 'Perceptual Faith'…), which are both clarifying and creatively provocative. Mildenberg's volume will certainly be a significant and substantial resource for scholars working on Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, but beyond this it has much to offer to the ongoing re-assessment of modernism and its legacies.