Merleau-Ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of "The Visible and the Invisible"

Few writers' unfinished works are considered to be among their most important, but such is the case with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "The Visible and the Invisible". What exists of it is a mere beginning, published posthumously, yet it is considered to have opened the path from modernism to postmodernism in philosophy.Merleau-Ponty is among the best of the "first generation" of French phenomenologists. His untimely death in 1961 left "The Visible and the Invisible" in a fragmentary state that exacerbates the text's difficulty and complexity. Low's insight is that material from some of Merleau-Ponty's lecture courses -- specifically, essays from 1952 onward, including his published lecture summaries from the College de France -- can provide the basis for completion. Working from this material and an outline of the book left by Merleau-Ponty, Low has written an account of how the book would have looked had Merleau-Ponty lived to complete it.Low shows a thorough mastery of the material and clarifies many difficult issues. Rather than presenting an argument, he presents an integration and extrapolation that go far beyond mere summary of the material: this distinguished scholar ends up providing a commentary on a work that was never finished, on various texts that were never published together, and on some that were never published at all. In the book's preface, Low writes: