Wild Time

This lecture takes up an understudied theme in the late works of Merleau-Ponty: “wild Being.”  I am especially interested in how his explorations of “wildness” in The Visible and the Invisible changed his approach to temporality, taking him further away from Husserl. Although the problem of “the present” was always alive in Merleau-Ponty’s work, his late unpublished lectures (“Philosophy Today”) and manuscripts (“The Intertwining-The Chiasm” and “Working Notes”) develop a theory of a posthuman temporality that opens onto multiple ways of experiencing “the present.”  At the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty was concerned with re-situating the human in an Umwelt that overlaps with other life forms.  How did this focus on the ecosystem rather than consciousness engender a “wild phenomenology”?