The heterogeneous origins of faith in Derrida and Merleau-Ponty

This thesis explores the structure and revealability of faith in the late works of Jacques Derrida and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Faith is investigated in terms of the ongoing social and philosophical consequences of the emergence of critiques of phenomenology. Specifically, faith is examined as articulated by Derrida's essay "Faith and Knowledge" and Merleau-Ponty's concept of perceptual faith in The Visible and the Invisible. This thesis argues that common conditions for the revealability of faith are located in these thinkers' respective efforts to exceed the irreducible relationship of the traditionally held opposition of intelligibility and sensibility. For heuristic, methodological purposes, Derrlda and Merleau-Ponty are compared in terms of the concept of the chora, Chora figures a rethinking of philosophical origins in terms of a discourse on irreducibility and alterity. At this point, Julia Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora is introduced as a convenient go-between, by which to triangulate the proposed relationship of Derrida and Merleau-Ponty, and so to posit a "perceptual chora" in the work of the latter. In this way, a comparison is made of the issues of embodiment and language that, it is argued, figure their meaningful intersection in terms of the revealability of faith.;Keywords: Faith, Perceptual Faith, Perception, Irreducibility, Chora, Phenomenology, Deconstruction, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Kristeva, Embodiment, Religion, Revealability, Aporia, Flesh, Ecart, Philosophical Origins, Alterity, Signification.