the puppet as a figure of the other final P PIRIS 2013 - Central ...

supports Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that ‘Merleau-Ponty has falsified Sartre’sontology’ (Langer 1998:101). Sartre’s ontology offers a greater ambiguity betweensubject and object than the strict dualism of which he is often accused.Mark Meyers makes the case in his article ‘Liminality and the Problem ofBeing-in-the-world’ (2008), that Sartrean dualism is not as strict as it seems andcontains a potential liminality of the subject and the object through Sartre’s concept ofnothingness and the relation of self to Other. Although Sartre always maintains adualism between subject and object, Meyers suggests that Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’snotions of being-in-the-world are close. Sartre’s ontology has to be understood as ‘adualism in constant dissolution, as a dualism that is always in the process of slippinginto a monism, yet which never fully slips’ (Meyers 2008: 87).In ‘Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme’ (1955), which is an elaboratedresponse to Merleau-Ponty’s critique, Beauvoir develops the idea that Merleau-Pontypresents not the philosophy of Sartre but that of a pseudo-Sartre. She argues thatSartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical positions are closer than Merleau-Pontyclaims.Despite the virulence of Merleau-Ponty’s attacks against Sartre, Thomas Busch(2010) suggests that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have maintained a dialogue in theirwritings. Sartre has accepted some of the critiques raised by Merleau-Ponty and haschanged his own thought in his later work such as Search for a Method (first publishedin 1958) and Critique of Dialectical Reason (first published in 1960). This evolution inSartre’s thought has led him to take a great interest in the theory of structures developedby French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Sartre admits that structures mediatehuman activities and thus affect individual freedom. He refers to structure in his work asthe ‘practico-inert’, which has a weight and intelligibility on its own. Yet Sartre cannot30