The Mortal Subject of Radical Reflection: Self-Consciousness, Sociality, and Politics in Merleau-Ponty

This article reconsiders the concept of radical reflection in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, arguing that, in its decentring of the subject who engages in reflection, radical reflection intimates a distinct theory of this very subject – one which will be developed in the final section of the Phenomenology and elsewhere. This reading diverges from those which consider radical reflection strictly in terms of a deflation of the reflective subject, and which position the concept in relation to a philosophy of nature as a process into which this subject would effectively be subsumed. My reading instead proposes that the critical insight of radical reflection into the worldly, situated, and finite character of philosophical reflection articulates three essential dimensions of subjectivity: self-consciousness, sociality, and (consciousness of) mortality. In developing this account of the subject of radical reflection, the article shows such a conception of subjectivity to be at stake at once in Merleau-Ponty’s approach to phenomenology and in his work on history and politics.