Motor syntax and corporal stylistics - Reflections on the bodily schema inthe early work of Merleau-Ponty

The question of the bodily schema is of considerable importance in M. Merle au-Ponty. It occupies a position of such key importance (from the Structure of Behaviour to the Visible and the Invisible) that, by examining it, one can rediscover and rearticulate numerous major themes in the philosopher: t he opening of space as egological space, the relationships of corporal sche ma to corporal schema which support implicitly an opening of this kind, the structuring of action and of thought by fields of retentional and protenti onal potentialities, the unity of human expressivity, the reflexivity which starts with the life of the body and the spaces for freedom which it arran ges for itself. This study presents, by means of phenomenological descripti ons, a resolutely dynamic conception of corporal schematism, thus separate from any identification between schema and image of the body; the bodily sc hema is conceived as a perceptivo-motory syntax in the sense of an immanent legality which links the space and the time of an action. If the "rule" of movement is singular on each occasion, it leans nonetheless on the (person al and social) habitus which give a typical form, a style, to the mobility of everyone. The beautiful, where harmony is taken for sole end, and the su blime in dancing, in which the suspension of the rule itself plays a role, are the most striking manifestations of free movement.