On bodily existence and sexuality in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
The text examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the bodily existence in the chapter "The Body as a Sexed Being" in Phenomenology of Perception. The chapter in question is known of its descriptions of sexuality and existence as bodily phenomena. For Merleau-Ponty sexed being of the body is an originally organic function, which is integrated in the whole of existence in the course of the life of an individual. By analysing the relationship between special sexual existence and the whole of human existence, Merleau-Ponty deepens one of the central ideas in Phenomenology of Perception, namely that existence is to be described as reciprocal expression between different fields of experience and that the body is the place of this expression.