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Ohio University Press/Swallow Press
The following review appeared in the March 2019 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only. Please review our Permission and Reprints Guidelines or email permissions@ala-choice.org.
Humanities
Philosophy
Beith’s book is an original and thoughtful contribution to scholarship on Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). Over the course of four chapters, Beith (Univ. of Maine) traces what he calls generative passivity through core texts in Merleau-Ponty’s corpus. The thesis is this: life, be it natural and vital or personal and social, is not caused by an objective set of preconditions. Rather, and paradoxically, life needs to happen to become possible. The child learning to walk, for instance, inaugurates a world that is walkable and can be engaged as such. At the same time, however, the child’s pre-walking movements now make sense as being on the way to walking. Life, in this way, does not emerge from a set of ready-made conditions that cause its appearance. Rather, it is only with the birth of life that its preconditions become meaningful. Beith draws Merleau-Ponty’s thought into conversation with a wide range of thinkers and traditions—Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, liberalism, social constructivism, autopoietic enactivism—and articulates an original conception of life and personhood.
--M. Butler, University Of Texas Rio Grande Valley