Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty

Susan Bredlau is Affiliated Faculty in the Philosophy Department at the University of Maine. She is the author of The Other in Perception: A Phenomenological Account of Our Experience of Other Persons, also published by SUNY Press. Talia Welsh is UC Foundation Professor of Philosophy and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is the author of The Child as Natural Phenomenologist: Primal and Primary Experience in Merleau-Ponty's Psychology.

"This volume is a significant contribution to the field of Merleau-Ponty studies, clarifying and critically engaging with crucial ideas at play throughout a wide array of scholarship on Merleau-Ponty. It will also serve to bring Merleau-Ponty's work to greater attention in the fields of medical humanities and disability studies, in ways that will shine new light on both the limitations and possibilities of Merleau-Ponty's thought for helping us to make sense of the great variation in human embodiment and psychology." — Laura McMahon, Eastern Michigan University

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty's WorkSusan Bredlau and Talia WelshPart I: Grounding a Phenomenology of Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology 1. Toward a Phenomenology of AbnormalityJenny Slatman2. What Can We Learn about the Normal from the Pathological? Merleau-Ponty, Goldstein, and NeuropsychologyGabrielle Jackson3. Merleau-Ponty and Ab/Normal Phenomenology: The Husserlian Roots of Merleau-Ponty's Account of ExpressionNeal DeRoo4. The Abnormalcy of "Normalcy": Merleau-Ponty, Russon, and the Normativity of ExperienceSusan Bredlau5. The Need for Merleau-Ponty in Foucault's Account of the AbnormalHannah Lyn VenablePart II: Practical Phenomenological Applications of Merleau-Ponty's Theories of Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology 6. Meandering Peripheries: A Ground without Figure for ReliefAdam Blair7. The Insight of Dispossession: Examining the Phenomenological and Political Significance of Merleau-Ponty's Account of the Spatial LevelWhitney Howell8. Moving without Movement: Merleau-Ponty's "I can" and the Memoirs of Bodily ImmobilityJames Rakoczi9. A Whole New World: Reimagining Divergent Sensory and Perceptual Experiences in Autism through Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of PerceptionJennifer E. Bradley10. Health and Other Reveries: Homo Curare, Homo Faber, and the Realization of CareJoel Michael Reynolds11. The Desexualization of Disabled People as Existential Harm and the Importance of AmbiguityChristine WieselerWorks CitedContributorsIndex