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This chapter suggests that phenomenologist Edmund Husserl hold a place of honour in Gilles Deleuze's dramaturgy. It explains that Deleuze was interested in Husserl and in phenomenology because it was essential for Deleuze to maintain a detached relationship with a friend/enemy capable of keeping him in suspense up to the end. The chapter argues that Deleuze was not a simple follower of Husserl, but that he took from the latter a certain orientation of thought which gives a new twist to the major themes of Cartesian Meditations.

In this chapter Scheler’s claim that it is the heart and not the head that gives us values is defended. Even some phenomenologists and those who appreciate Scheler’s contribution to the phenomenology of values have given their own reasons in defence. The success of Scheler’s ethics depends not only on our ability to show both the possibilities on how we can grow morally but how we must also have sufficient access to the hierarchy of values. It is through special acts of feeling that we can have this access, we must always remind ourselves that Scheler’s vision of feelings is very complex and for him there are distinct levels as well. Scheler’s claims that “feeling” gives us an autonomous intentional access to the values that are the bases of moral decisions. For Scheler, moral values differ from all other values and it goes along with realization.

The obscure meaning of “vacancy” in Wordsworth’s drama is explored in this chapter, where the word takes on metaphysical significance. In another of Wordsworth’s works, Home at Grasmere, vacancy again makes an appearance. Wordsworthian vacancy is intended to mean an unbalanced state of mind and is also a description of the mind’s unplumbed depths. Wordsworth’s use of “vacant” in his early poetry indicates that there is a dismaying quality about it, earning Wordsworth a reputation as a negative phenomenologist. Derrida’s visual history of blindness is also examined in the chapter through his work Memoirs of the Blind, a work that is centrally concerned with the relations among writing, drawing, and self-portraiture. The negativity contained in the title suggests that only through the lens of negativity or an unknowing blindness are certain kinds of knowledge made available to us.

Merleau-Ponty’s profound engagement with literary writers is readily apparent: Proust and Valéry, also Stendhal, Paul Claudel, Claude Simon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Balzac, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France as well as the course of 1953–54 all address questions of expression and literary language: The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Research on the Literary Usage of Language, and The Problem of Speech. Recent transcription and publication of these new resources lend urgency to this project. Our use of the term “poet” includes literary authors in general, be they novelists or “poets” in the narrower sense, and our focus is on the writers of “modernity” or “modernism.” The meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics opens with reflections on philosophy of language in sharp contrast with Sartre’s What is Literature? It studies four paradoxes of literary expression: the paradox of the true and the imaginary, of speech and silence, of the subjective (the most secret) and the objective, and of the relation of the author and the person who lives. These are the “surprises,” the “traps,” that make literature appear as a problem to itself and cause the writer himself or herself to ask: “what is literature?”

This chapter examines the reception of Ravaisson’s account of habit in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century French philosophy. The first two sections examine its reception in the work of Albert Lemoine, Léon Dumont, and Henri Bergson. The third section examines its reception in the work of the French phenomenologists and theorists of the lived body, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter shows how Ravaisson’s account of inclination relates to these notions of the lived body. In conclusion, it shows how contemporary Merleau-Ponty-inspired accounts of pre-reflective, embodied action as a form of ‘coping’ can be extended by Ravaisson’s concern for tendency and inclination in motor habit.