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Vibrating Colors and Silent Bodies. Music, Sound and Silence in Maurice-Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Dualism

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology offers an extremely robust and frequently utilized framework for understanding embodied life, but the interlocking roles of music, sound and silence in his treatment of embodiment are rarely noted. Across his oevre, Merleau-Ponty engages art, literature philosophy and politics, and this article prioritizes Merleau-Ponty's interventions on René Descartes' notorious mind–body dualism, which remains a polemical touchstone for music scholarship engaged with embodied listening and performance. Unpacking some surprising sonorous dimensions of Merleau-Ponty's interventions on Cartesian dualism, this article draws critical focus on Merleau-Ponty's engagement with three crucial aspects of Descartes' thought: his theory of vision, the cogito and the method of doubt through which he produces the cogito. Attending to the important, if enigmatic, sonic aspects of Merleau-Ponty's anti-Cartesianism yields questions regarding the extent to which his philosophy is amenable to a thinking of the body as a site for socio-political transformation. Reading Merleau-Ponty at the conjunction of philosophy and musicology, then, reveals alternately resonant and silent sites for further theorizing with respect to the politics of musical embodiment.